Vehicle-Based Multi-Services for Future Smart Cities

Vehicles are crucial for sustaining socioeconomic activity and improving quality of life in modern cities by offering diverse services. These include passenger mobility, goods delivery, information acquisition, and acting as mobile servers such as food trucks and mobile lockers. At the same time, they also contribute to traffic congestion and air pollution. This tension fosters the rise of urban resource-conserving and sustainable service solutions. In this article, we introduce the concept of “Vehicle-Based Multi-Services” (VeMuS), in which a single vehicle offers multiple services simultaneously. Drawing on practical use cases, we examine service classification and integration for vehicles and the potential for the synergy effect and multitasking. We construct a general framework to study VeMuS and propose research questions in three key components: VeMuS design, VeMuS operations, and VeMuS evaluation. This article highlights the potential of VeMuS to create more sustainable, efficient, and adaptable urban services for future smart cities.

Funding: This research is supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF), Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) programme. The Mens, Manus, and Machina (M3S) is an interdisciplinary research group (IRG) of the Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) centre. H. Sun is in part supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 72301179], the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation [Grant 2025A1515012815], and the “Pengcheng Peacock Project” of Shenzhen University.